Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback 5e actions and bonus actions complexity

I’m a big fan of 5E, and I think that the way the action economy works in 5e with move, action, bonus action is simple and makes perfect sense. When you’re playing with just pen, paper and dice, you want to make combat rounds and actions as cut and dry as possible so that players know exactly when they’ve done everything they can in a turn. You don’t want players dealing with something like action points where you have to keep track of how many you have, remember how many each action costs etc.

But in BG3, I feel like the 5E action economy ironically has the opposite effect. It makes things feel more complicated and unintuitive. The reason for this is that there are so many different things you can do, and it’s not immediately clear what things are actions and what things are bonus actions. For example, looking in your inventory, using some items are actions, while some others are bonus actions. If I try to interact with an object in the environment in combat, is that going to be an action or a bonus action?

Also, it seems weird that my thief can attack twice with his offhand weapon in a round, but only once with his main weapon.

As a 5E player, this doesn’t bother me too much, but I feel like non-D&D players may be confused.

Anyway, I don’t want to get rid of the 5e action economy in the game. But maybe there is a way to make it feel less awkward and arbitrary?

The moment i was just start reading CRB of Pathfinder 2e, one of thought immediately came was: "Well damn. If only 2e was released few years back, Larian would immediately pick it instead of D&D 5e, taking how close it is to DOS 1,2, and overall easier port as CRPG".
Now it's of course imposible making such changes. They making specifically BG game, and started it as based on 5e. There is no turning back at this point.

Though maybe their next game...

As far as I can tell, interacting with object doesn't cost any action or bonus action at all, unless it specifically says so or you try to throw it or something. I've had one of my characters go around looting all the dead enemies in the middle of combat and all it took was movement to reach each body. That said, it did seem like picking up certain items from bodies took an action, such as throwables or consumables like Alchemists Fire or a bottle of poison, presumably so you don't just pick it off the body and then instantly chuck it at an enemy.

Really? This is one of the (many) areas I thought they did really well, and I've only recently gotten back into D&D with some friends from 25+ years ago. My first 5e game session on DnDBeyond / Roll20 was about 2 months ago, and I think a lot of the stuff in this game is pretty accurate. I always hated action points in a game.

I noticed this too. Also, throwing an action using the button in the hotbar costs resources but if you drag and drop something in the battlefield you can "throw" things around for free.

Further compounding on this, one of my friends that couldn't enjoy 5e because he has attention problems found the UI to be pretty well laid out and informative. He cited that you get the circle and triangle for action and bonus action and almost everything that used one or the other had an orange or blue background respectively so it was easy to remember.